Honor and Blood

by James Galloway

He reached the first rock spire about an hour before sunset. The spires were clustered together loosely, a good distance between each one, and as he passed by the first, he slowed to a walking pace. This was the place. What had called out to him? What was it that had incited such a powerful reaction? The static charge that had been in the air was gone now, but there was something else. It was a sense of...presence. There was someone here, a someone whose very presence weighed down on the air itself. The Weave itself seemed to oscillate, to shimmer, to vibrate in response to this presence, and the strands were actively leaning towards some focal point.

  As if the presence had the power to affect the Weave, just by its presence alone.

  Would he find Fara'Nae here? Was this a place holy to her? The only beings he could think of that could do such things were gods. Was this collection of rock spires like the courtyard in the hedge maze back in the Tower? It wasn't the Goddess. He'd feel it if she was the one that was here. Her sense of presence was completely different from this.

  At least that sense of presence acted as a beacon. He could follow it right to its source.

  Sarraya began to get fidgety as Tarrin walked towards that sense of presence, slowly, calmly, more curious than worried. "Tarrin? I feel...."

  "I know. I feel it too."

  "Is this what you heard?"

  "No, but this is what called me," he said. He didn't know how he knew that, but he did. "It's over there," he said, pointing.

  "That's not the only thing here," Sarraya said. "I just saw a Selani."

  "Where?" he asked.

  "To your right," she replied. "Just behind that rock spire over there."

  Tarrin turned and looked. It was a smaller rock spire, as thick around as most large trees, and only about twenty spans high. He couldn't see a Selani, but Selani were experts at hiding and stealth. If Sarraya saw one, she saw one, and she was lucky to see the Selani in the first place.

  "I'll go see what else is around. I'll be right back."

  "Be careful," he called as her wings began to buzz, and she faded from sight as she started towards the rock spire.

  Tarrin continued walking towards that sense of presence alone. He wasn't really afraid. There had been nothing in the call that invoked fear. Even his feral suspicion seemed to be overwhelmed by the wild curiosity behind the strange, voiceless call. All of him wanted to find out who this strange presence was, and why it called to him.

  For another ten minutes he moved towards that sensation, until he came around a small rock spire and got his first look at it.

  It was a humanoid, or at least he thought it was. It was tall, and was totally garbed in a strange black cloak, a cloak so black that it consumed any sense of dimension the figure held. It was as if the cloak had been cut from the most impenetrable darkness, and the figure he saw was nothing but a cut out sheet of paper held up to the sun. It stood upon one of the rock spires, one of the smaller ones, and he couldn't tell if it faced him or not. All he could see was a black shadow between him and the sun. The only reason he could tell it was a cloak was because the afternoon winds pulled and tugged at it, making the dimensionless form before him waver and ripple like a reflection on dark water.

  He came to a stop about a hundred spans from the spire, looking up the thirty spans to the figure. He was closer now, and he could see that it was indeed a cloak. It opened occasionally in the wind to reveal a formless figure beneath, a figure wearing black garments that blended in with the utter blackness of the cloak, serving to distort the figure's shape and form from his eyes. That opening told him that the figure faced him, but he could not see through the hood to discern any features.

  He still felt no fear, but he felt a powerful sense from the figure. The Weave was bending in towards it, and just as the Sorcerer back in that city had sensed him, so he sensed it. This figure was a Sorcerer, and its power was unfathomable. He had never felt anything like it before.

  "Vosh," the figure intoned, and that made his jaw drop, intoned in a rich alto voice that absolutely had to belong to a woman. That was a Sha'Kar word! "Vosh. Unda ne. Vasti dosba no."

  He was absolutely stunned. The pronunciation was much different from what Keritanima had taught him, but it was undeniable that it was Sha'Kar that the form was speaking. "Time-ending. Arrived have. I for-you-waiting have been." At last. You have come. I have waited for you.

  He was completely bowled over. She spoke Sha'Kar! That language was dead, nobody spoke it anymore! And she spoke it like she'd spoken it all her life!

  "Do I surprise you?" she asked in Sulasian, and her pattern of speech was odd. It was as if she spoke every word with absolute exacting precision before moving on to the next. "You have come. You are ready," she told him, reverting to Sha'Kar.

  Hearing her speak Sha'Kar invoked an automatic response in him, and his gift for languages rose up, instantly correcting the improper pronunciations that Keritanima had taught him when they were learning the language. "Wh-What do you mean? Who are you?" he managed to stammer, in a Sha'Kar dialect almost mirroring her own.

  "Who I am does not matter," she said, reaching up for the hood of her cloak. "That you heard my call is all that matters now. You are ready." She pulled back her hood, and he almost fell to his knees.

  She was a Selani!

  Selani! Her features were undeniable! She actually bore a curious resemblance to Allia in her cheeks and her blue, blue eyes. Her hair was silver where Allia's was white, shimmering in the brutal desert sun, and she had a faint scar on her left cheek, a dark line on her smooth, dusky brown face. The scar did nothing to mar her exceptional beauty, it only accented the graceful beauty of her face to his eyes. Almost as if it were a beauty mark. Her face was lovely, but it was her eyes that captured his attention. A deep blue, like Allia's, but behind them was a sort of deep ocean of knowldge and wisdom that made her eyes haunting, piercing, ensnaring the eyes of others yet making them worrisome and uncomfortable to stare into their depths. Those eyes looked into you, and they exposed all your secrets, made her know every part of you, both good and bad. There was no hiding from those eyes. They were not the eyes of an ordinary mortal being, and they marked her for the kind of exotic, unique entity that she was. Piercing blue eyes stared down at him, and the expression on the face was stony, unreadable. She was obviously mature, but her features did not betray her age. But there was a set in the way she held herself, the way she looked at him with those powerful eyes, a sense and feeling much like Triana. This woman was old. At least as old as Triana, and that made him make a vital connection.

  A truth crashed down on him at that moment. Sha'Kar is alot like Selani, he had told Keritanima as he learned it. The words are different, but the structure of both languages is similar, Keritanima had told him. Almost as if they had been descended from the same root language.

  This strange woman wasn't Selani. She was Sha'Kar!

  The Selani and the Sha'Kar were related!

  A Sha'Kar! A living Sha'Kar! They were supposed to be extinct, the race snuffed out in the Breaking! He took a frightful step back from her, fearing her now, because if she was a Sha'Kar, then that meant that she was an Ancient. It certainly explained how her very presence seemed to attract the Weave, warp it, draw it to her. Her power was incredible!

  "You see truth," she said in a calm voice. "You know me now. You fear it."

  "Y-Y-You're--You're a Sha'Kar!" he managed to get out.

  "If giving me such title pleases you," she told him mysteriously.

  "What do you want from me?"

  "You have heard my call," she said again. "It is time."

  "Time? Time for what?"

  "Time," she replied, pulling a slender arm from beneath her cloak and simply pointing a delicate finger at him.

  And with that word and gesture, the ground in front of him just simply exploded. The impact of it blasted the breath from his lungs, picked him up, carried him along with the shockwave of the explosion as bits of rock and debris drove into him. He felt him
self flying through the air, and then was tumbling on the ground with a dozen shouts of pain emanating from various parts of his body. He rolled to a stop, his body a bit dazed, but his mind whirling like a hurricane. There had been no touching the Weave, no sense of Sorcery from her! It was as if she'd woven the spell outside his senses!

  She attacked him! She was a Sha'Kar, an Ancient, and she had attacked him! How was he going to fight an Ancient? How was he supposed to stand against that kind of incredible power?

  He rose up to his feet, crouching down over them, tail slashing back and forth as an instinctual need to face this challenger battled with the human realization that this was no being to fight. Panting from the pain of the shrapnel, pain that eased as his body mended itself, he looked up and saw her descending from the top of the spire slower than would be natural, as if the air was holding onto her and lowering her gently to the ground.

  His mind raced through innumerable possibilities, but it kept returning to two simple conclusions. One, that there was no escape from someone like this. Her magic could easily keep him from escaping. And since he could not flee, he had to fight. Sarraya wasn't here, so that made his most poweful weapon unavailable to him, but that didn't mean that he was just going to lie down and die for her benefit. He was a Were-cat. He knew how to fight without Sorcery.

  That one thought nearly scared him into losing his composure. Fight an Ancient? It was madness! Something very close to abject terror closed on him as the woman's feet hit the ground, as she lowered those eyes on him. She outmatched him in every sense of the word...but then again, he'd been outmatched before, and he had found ways to win. It was live or die, so he'd better get his mind going and find a way to either defeat her or escape from her.

  With deliberate slowness, he drew his sword, letting her hear the sound, trying to do anything to rattle her steely composure. He was much taller than her, and he was a physically intimidating person. It had worked on many others before her. Perhaps it would work on her as well.

  She simply stood there, staring at him.

  He couldn't show fear. Gritting his teeth, feeling like he was about to run into the mouth of some giant predator, Tarrin exploded forward out of nowhere, moving with all the speed and power his body could give to him. Sword held point towards her, he covered the distance between them faster than a thoroughbred could sprint, his fear and adrenaline granting him incredible speed. She simply watched him coming, and made no move to avoid him or defend herself. He knew that that was a very important observation, but if she wasn't going to move, he was going to take his shot at her. He charged right at her, on top of her in the blink of an eye, and he thrust the black-bladed sword directly at her chest.

  And she made no move to evade, until the very last second, when she pulled her cloak around her.

  The blade met nothing. It simply kept going, and going, even as Tarrin's feet slid to a stop just before her. It sank into the impenetrable blackness of her cloak, swallowed up by it, and it met nothing to slow it down. He thrust through her so hard that his paw also dipped into that inky blackness, and when it did he felt an agonizing, biting cold slash through his paw and arm, like the touch of a Wraith. Crying out, he recoiled from that icy cold, letting go of the sword in his haste to free himself from that painful touch. He pulled his paw back, seeing that the fur had frost on it, and his fingers were numb and nerveless.

  The sword was simply gone.

  It had went inside the cloak! The cloak wasn't natural, it was some kind of magical artifact!

  She gave him the slightest of knowing smiles as he staggered back away from her. She reached within her cloak, and with deliberate slowness, drew out his sword, holding it by the middle of the blade. It was nearly as tall as she was, but she held it with a surety and confidence that told him that she was much stronger than she appeared. She glanced at the blade casually, then tossed it aside like it was so much dross.

  Feeling was returning to his paw. He flexed it a few times as he took a few more steps back from her, trying to figure out what to do next. But she only gave him a slight look, a shift in the set of her eyes, and that was all he needed to react to whatever was about to happen. He spun aside and sprinted away from her, diving over a large rock, then turning and rushing towards the nearest rock spire. This was insanity! What was he supposed to do against something like that? She couldn't be injured by weapons, and he'd destroy himself with Sorcery long before he got anywhere near her!

  He reached the spire, hiding behind it for cover, trying to recover his breath and his racing mind, as his heart pounded in his chest. Think, he had to think! He couldn't use Sorcery, and he couldn't fight her hand to paw. That didn't leave him many options. He could use some Druidic magic, but he'd never tried to use it in a fight before, at least not consciously. And Sarraya had never taught him any Druidic spells that would be useful in a fight.

  "You shame us," the woman called out. "Must I force it of you?"

  And with that, the rock spire against which he was leaning began to shudder and vibrate. For a fleeting moment, he could feel the magic from her, feel it through the weave, a rippling and pulsating energy that vibrated through it like the plucking of a lute's string. The sound of cracking rock reached him, and he looked up in time to see several large chunks of the spire beginning to fall down to the desert floor. He scampered aside as a big one hit very close to him. He raced away from the spire as it shuddered and groaned, then ear-splitting sound of ripping stone raked over his ears. He turned back in time to see the entire rock spire shudder, then begin to topple to one side. It struck the desert floor in a massive cloud of dust, with so much energy that the rock and ground beneath his feet heaved violently from the blow, nearly knocking him down in its convulsions. The sound of the impact nearly deafened him, sent a huge cloud of dust roaring over him.

  Merciful Goddess! he thought frantically. What power! And without High Sorcery!

  She was just too powerful! There was no way to fight her, no way to hide from her, no way to run from her!

  He had no choice. He couldn't fight someone like this. He needed High Sorcery.

  Paws limning over in Magelight, Tarrin reached out to the Weave, felt it connect to him, and then try to drown him in a tidal wave of its power. More than ever before, he felt a modicum of control over the power, as if his abilities had reached a point where he could control High Sorcery to a limited degree. He found that he could push against that power, resist it at least enough to be able to use the power within before it built up past the point where he could contain it. It flooded into him, joined with him, and that power caused him to become more attuned and connected to the Weave. He could feel her magic now, feel it flow and eddy within the strands. With a primal scream, he harnessed that power within him, used it against the Weave, caused the strands to expel flows of the Spheres. Those flows coalesced around his paws as he wove them into a spell, and then he released its power. The weave manifested as a powerful blast of wind, shattering the dust cloud and then sending it back the other way. The force of the wind was enough to pick up small stones, sending a cloud of debris flying back at the Sha'Kar with enough force to injure, maybe even kill if they hit right.

  But the cloud parted, then passed by on both sides of the Sha'Kar woman harmlessly. She gave him a penetrating look, a look that unnerved him despite the distance between them, and then she gave him a chilling smile. "Now," she said, and then she raised delicate hands limned over with the ghostly radiance of Magelight.

  She could use High Sorcery too!

  She was a Weavespinner!

  The sight of that caused his human mind to retreat, to literally drag the Cat out into the forefront. He needed all his power, he needed the rage of fury to give him the power to control his own magic. He needed everything he could possibly find, because he was facing an opponent who had the power to beat him at his own game.

  With a building roar, Tarrin's body exploded completely into Magelight as he relaxed the constraints he
had placed on himself, and it responded by trying to burn him to ashes. Rational thought was scoured away, leaving behind only the instinctive impulses of the Cat, a mind that did not need to think in order to function. Power that would kill a linked Circle roared into him, through him, saturated his being with its power. It sent a shockwave of pain through him, pain that his Cat nature could block, ignore, shrug off, as the animal within ignored the dangers to the body in order to protect itself from an enemy.

  So fast that most Sorcerers would not be able to follow it, with a speed borne of familiarity, Tarrin wove together that chaotic weave of Fire, Air, Water, and Divine flows, with only token flows of the other Spheres to grant his weave the power of High Sorcery, and then unleashed it on the dark figure. A blinding, incandescent bolt of pure magical power, a bar of light containing heat beyond anything natural, ripped through the air as it hurtled directly at the Sha'Kar's body. But the Sha'Kar slapped the bolt aside with a hand casually, and it deflected in its path and struck the ground a few hundred spans behind her. That touch caused the rock to vaporize, and then to explode, sending a shockwave of flying debris, dust, and loud noise roaring across the small forest of rocky pillars.

  The Sha'Kar responded with a whip-like tongue of fire that emanated from her hand, and then she lashed it at him over the distance between them. It moved with a speed that defied rational thought, but to Tarrin's heightened senses, it moved with a ponderous slowness that he could easily track. He wove together a weave of Fire and released it, forming it around his paw, and he caught that tendril of fire as it tried to strike him. He felt the nature of the weave, then charged it with a huge surge of Air. The Fire mixed with the Air, and he sent it back towards the Sha'Kar like throwing a burning pot of pitch. The tendril detonated along its length in rapid succession, but it winked out as the Sha'Kar countered with flows of Water into the tendril to counter the explosive mix of flows.

  He didn't hesitate. His Cat mind was already working on the next gambit, weaving together a weave of High Sorcery that was primarily composed of Earth. It was the magical effect he'd seen Jegojah use before, and he released it by stomping on the ground. It created a seismic shockwave that raced in the Sha'Kar's direction at shocking speed, causing a line of dust and flying shards of rock to follow in its wake as it shattered the rock through which it travelled. But the Sha'Kar rose up into the air, allowing the shockwave to travel under her harmlessly. He felt her weaving spells now, using High Sorcery, a weave of Water, Air, and Divine mainly, and then she released it. A pale beam of cold blue erupted from her hand. He didn't have the time or the presence to study the weave and create a counter for it, so he simply dove aside as it hit the ground where he'd been standing. He looked back, and saw that the ground had been covered by a thick layer of ice.